Steve Drummond

Kainaz Amaria
/ NPR

Steve Drummond heads up two teams of journalists at NPR. NPR Ed is a nine-member team that launched in March 2014, providing deeper coverage of learning and education and extending it to audiences across digital platforms. Code Switch is an eight-person team that covers race and identity across the network, and in an award-winning weekly podcast.

Drummond brings to these initiatives more than 20 years' experience covering education issues, and nearly two decades at NPR in a variety of roles. Prior to this assignment, he was the network's Senior National Editor. In that role, from 2007 through 2013, he oversaw domestic news coverage and a team of more than 60 reporters, producers and editors in Washington, DC, and 18 bureaus around the country. In 2012, he also served as acting Senior Editor for Investigations, managing a team of six reporters and producers on investigative projects.

In addition to his journalism credentials, Drummond has also spent some time in the classroom. In the early 1990s, he left journalism temporarily, for a graduate degree in education and a brief career as a middle and high school teacher. His journalism and education interests merged in 1993, when he joined Education Week, where he spent six years as a senior editor and writer.

Drummond joined NPR in 2000 as an editor on the national desk. In 2003, he became the senior editor of All Things Considered. He returned to the national desk in 2004 to edit coverage of poverty and welfare, education, religion, and crime and punishment.

At NPR his work has been honored with many of journalism's highest awards, including three Peabody Awards, two Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University awards, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the Edward R. Murrow Award.

Drummond's work with NPR Correspondent Laura Sullivan on an investigation into sexual assault of Native American women earned a 2009 duPont Award. In 2008, Drummond edited a series by Sullivan, "36 Years of Solitary: Murder, Death and Justice on Angola," which also earned a Peabody, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award. A three-part series, "Bonding for Profit," exposed deep flaws in the bail bonds system in this country. The series, reported by Sullivan and edited by Drummond, earned a 2010 Peabody and a 2011 duPont award. A series examining South Dakota's system for handling Native American children in foster care won a 2011 Peabody Award.

Drummond has been a reporter with The Tampa Tribune and The St.Petersburg Times in Florida and at the Associated Press in Detroit. He has written for a variety of publications including The Detroit News, The DetroitFree Press, The New York Times, and Teachermagazine.

Drummond holds a bachelor's degree and two master's degrees, in journalism and education, from the University of Michigan. In the fall of 2013 he was a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.

It's our job to report on the big changes happening as millions of students are out of school and learning at home or online. We know for every child, that experience is different:

Summer camp is canceled. The school year ended weeks early. No one knows what fall is going to be like. "Virtual" graduation ... zoom classes. A lot of the things that were "normal" have changed. Face it, your kids are dealing with a lot these days.

We asked teachers and students to put on their headphones and turn their ideas into sound for our first-ever NPR Student Podcast Challenge — and boy, did they. We got nearly 5,700 entries, from all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Podcasts that explored climate change. Podcasts about gun control and mental health. About great books and mythology. Hedgehogs and history.

Teachers and their students at 1,580 schools participated: all told, roughly 25,000 students nationwide.

Both WKAR and NPR are committed to education reporting you can find nowhere else. Every Tuesday on Morning Edition, Kevin Lavery tells you about the challenges and triumphs in turning around literacy here in Michigan. NPR also has an education unit, headed by native Michigander Steve Drummond, who talked about the importance of covering this topic with WKAR’s Reginald Hardwick.

Advances in laptops and technology are pushing screens into schools like never before. So what does this drive toward digital classrooms mean for that oldest and simplest of touch screens: a plain old sheet of paper?

It may seem a wasteful and obsolete technology, ready to follow the slate chalkboard and the ditto machine into the Smithsonian, or a flat, white invitation to creativity, just waiting for some learning magic to happen.

We've written a lot about the link between college and the workforce — and the kinds of skills graduates will need in the 21st century to succeed. One of the skills you need is knowing how to present yourself. To put your best foot forward in the workplace, and in life.